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This blog post is part of my course Social Media Strategist at Social Media Academy which I previously blogged about here.

Cross Functional Social Media in Business. Why?

Blyanntar.jpg
Photo: BiT.

Early in this class it stood clear that Social Media is not about places and spaces, or even tools, but about people and the conversations you have with them. So, to be where the people who talk about you are is paramount, you cannot choose these places yourself. But in addition to that, in order to have meaningfull conversations, you need to have the right people there. Because it is obvious that different people have different needs and if only people from one department of your organization, it is likely they cannot answer all the questions. And if you are very active you set the expectations high and when you do not deliver the fall will be greater.

It’s like telling a painter to only use green (okay, there are some famous blue works).

Colouring pencils.jpg
Photo: MichaelMaggs. License:CC-BY-SA-3.0

So are your organization super talented and able to create monochromatic masterpieces or do you think you might have use for all the colours in the palette? Chances are you belong to the latter group and that is why you should implement a cross functional use of  Social Media in your business. Or do you want a marketing resource answering engineering questions on Twitter or an engineer answering sales questions in the LinkedIn group? If you cannot give relevant answers it makes you irrelevant and people will stop listening to you and forget about you.

But it is obviously hard to go all-in and apply good use all over your organization which leads to the following question:

Which implementation order do you think it is most likely to render a success?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Media Aided Support Organization Lesson

This blog post is part of my course Social Media Strategist at Social Media Academy which I previously blogged about here.

Once again, I am having some troubles doing this exercise with my company as a subject. As we are a strict consultant company and don’t sell any products there is no support function at all today, so the question on enhancing the support function gets weird. Instead, as before, I will focus on Wikimedia Sverige and Wikipedia. Wikimedia is initself a support organisation to Wikipedia, which makes this an important function.

Computer-kitten
So firstly, finding engaged users. Luckily there is a list of mentors who have agreed to answer questions, Already a collection of online voluntary support users! Luckily I know a few of them and that they really are power users and that getting them influential would be of great importance. Secondly I would start following their user pages, to be able to chip in with my 2 öre and show them that we care enough to help them too.

There is also the facebook group, but unfortunatly it seems that I am the most active person there, and that I have not had that many possibilities to answer questions.

But there is also some other places to get support right now; questions about Wikipedia, questions about facts and questions about images. And it is very easy to find out who has been most active there (Wikipedia, facts, images).

Splendid! We now have a list of the people who is really helping out on the support side. So what can our strategy be to empower them and what would our strategy be?

Firstly, be active at the places and spaces where the discussion is. Secondly, personally give them credit when credit is due and help them out in the qickest way possible. These are quite obvious. But there is also a point trying to monitor what is said about Wikipedia in Swedish and be bold and answers these questions as soon as possible, or at least point the persons in the right direction. Still this is not so much of a strategy, but more of fixing what is broken today. What would be really helpfull would be a tool, in which a person who wants to know something more could ask for it, without even having to leave Wikipedia or search hard for it.

This is nothing that is technically possible today, but since it is of strategic importance, developers should be put to look into the issue. This is great! We have just found a flaw in our system and also have an idea what would make it better. Even if we sort of knew this already, we had not rationalized about it.

Is there something else that you think we could do better?

Integrated business partner engagement Wikipedia/Wikimedia

This blog post is part of my course Social Media Strategist at Social Media Academy which I previously blogged about here.

Since I don’t know of any indirect channels my company has, I’ll explore another interest of mine, Wikipedia. Or to be more precise Wikimedia Sverige, the Swedish chapter of Wikimedia foundation, who runs Wikipedia. Here there are probably a lot of indirect channels, but two springs to mind, librarians and teachers. In this excersise I will look into the collaboration with teachers.

 

Aource: "Von Anker bis Zünd, Die Kunst im jungen Bundesstaat 1848 - 1900", Kunsthaus Zürich
The places where we are active is on Facebook, with a group and a fan pageTwitter, our blog and of course Wikipedia. We have a few other accounts which we registered to own the names but that we are not using frequently. (One that we will start to use soon is live streaming video.)

 

So how to figure out who in the discussions are teacher? Luckily I have two people in my network that I knew were teachers Per Falk and Magnus Eriksson which reminded me of a third contact in my network who also os a teacher Kristina Alexandersson.

 

In Facebook their involvment was nothing more than a few likes on our fan page. On Twitter on the other hand their is some more discussion, especially with @kalexandersson who is very active and quite influential. In turn, this reminded me of a university teacher, Mathias Klang, who I recognize from twitter (and IRL) and also has been retweeting @WikimediaSE a few times and he is also influential. But the discussions are scarce, mostly retweeting each other. There is lots of room on improvement from our side here.
Looking for Kristina’s pages and groups on Facebook gives no good leads, but Magnus leads to Mittuniversitet, a university grop, which however has no discussions at all. Per Falk’s facebook profile leads me to Pedagogiskt Café – inspirationsplats för pedagoger i Stockholm which right now doesn’t have any interesting discussions for us but could be a lead with a fair amount of followers.

 

In Kristina’s LinkedIn, I find that she is a member of Innovative Learning & Education Innovators which could be interesting, however not very specific to Sweden. But it also leads me to her slideshare in which there could be some interesting persons to follow up on. Mathias Klang gives me no leads in LinkedIn and the others I can not find.

 

So what to do now? Firstly investigate my contacts’ contacts further and see if there are any places we are missing out on. Secondly, try to engage them and their friends in discussions, finding out how we can help them in the best way.

 

A hard question I faced was, how to follow discussions about the global phenomenon Wikipedia in Swedish? There is plenty of discussions, mostly in other languages, which is outside our scope since there is plenty of national chapters to share the burden. The only tool I have found is Twazzup.

 

Anyone has any thoughts for that? Oh, and other tip is apprieciated.

How do you contribute to your network?

File:10 Öre provmynt i guld ca 1882.jpg
Image from Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

This blog post is part of my course Social Media Strategist at Social Media Academy which I previously blogged about here.

When I look at the contacts that I have and care about what they do with their social presence I see that they are more active and contributes with more value, not just to me, but to many people. Perhaps that is why I at first found them being interesting, that they really are social and friendly even though they interact with people they might not have ever met before or even never going to meet. Wat do they they do? well, obviously they pass on interesting things and answers questions, but the things that really make some people shine is that they actively are finding the interesting conversations and chip in with their 2 cents although they have not been asked to.

This clearly speaks for that they have some sort of scanning and search methodology that is powerful, it seeems improbable that they just randomly finds places where they can and are willing to help. But it is not clear on how they are doing it, so my question to you who reads this is:
How do you do to be so effective in contributing with value to your network?

Social Media Strategist

This week I started a new class, Social Media Strategist at Social Media Academy. That is why I for some coming weeks will post some blog posts in English. One of our first assignments was to post a blog using different techniques. We also got a quote to get us started “Do not think about what you write, but write about what you think.” Since one of the things we should do was to upload and embedd a video I twisted this a little and came up with “Do not think about what you film, but film what you think.”.

I have made some online videos before, but it is still a fairly new experience. At the time of filming it felt very natural to take a sidestep, but I see now that it looks kind of weird. Well, another lesson learned. Joakim Jardenberg, which i mentioned in the clip is @jocke on Twitter.

For Quora i continued with my twist and asked “Is it easier to understand thoughts explained in video than in writing?”.

Finally I made a short presentation about myself and uploaded to SlideShare. Even though I have read many presentations there before, this was my first upload.

Corvus monedula

Eller kaja som man säger på svenska. Den satt och tittade på mig på en uteservering i Karlstad och jag hade kameran med mig. Så det gick rätt bra. Jag nominerade den till Featured Picture på Wikimedia Commons, men kraven där är väldigt höga så trots 6 röster för räckte det inte hela vägen.

Corvus monedula portrait
Foto: Jan Ainali. Licens: CC-BY-3.0

Remingtonskrivmaskin

Återigen är veckans bild en bild från en wikisafari. Denna är från Insjön och Clas Ohlsonmuseet. Det är inte den bästa jag har gjort, jag hade lite för bråttom för att det skulle bli riktigt bra. Men det är något med färgerna och tapeten som gör att jag ändå gillar den.

Remingtonskrivmaskin CO
Foto: Jan Ainali. Licens: CC-BY-SA-3.0

Test av iMiev

Efter att OKQ8 annonserat att de börjar hyra ut elbilar bokade jag upp mig för att provköra. Jag är rätt nöjd, det var en mycket trevlig dag och jag är än mer övertygad om att jag gillar mitt medlemskap i Elbil Sverige. Jag har vloggat lite om det på Bambuser och du kan se dem här nedan. Jag är dock lite nybörjare så att två av dem blev upp och ner men jag lovar att bli bättre till nästa gång.

Det här var mitt första intryck efter att ha kört från Slussen till Gullmarsplan och sedan till Djurgården.
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En titt på interiören.
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Nu har jag hunnit snurra runt en hel del på Östermalm.
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En sväng ut till Fittja och tillbaks till söder via Kungens kurva.
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Helgon i drivor

Den här veckans bild håller inte speciellt hög teknisk kvalitet. Den är tagen med stillbildsfunktionen av en videokamera från 2004 i dåliga ljusförhållanden. Men jag tyckte ändå att det var intressant att lägga upp bilden, på grund av innehållet. Fotot tog jag på en tågluff i Östeuropa och det här är i klostret i Snagov där myten säger att Drakula är begravd. Men så säger de inte på plats, istället blev jag tagen på en rundtur runt klostet. Efter att ha gått runt på kyrkogården så sa guiden att det här var ju bara en del av vad som fanns att se. Tydligen kunde de inte utvidga kyrkogården, eftersom de låg bredvid ett träsk. Och nu var kyrkogården var full så de hade ett rotationssystem för att göra plats för nya begravningar. Men de helgon som redan var begravda kunde inte köra iväg hur som helst. Så istället sparade de skallarna i källaren. Och den fick jag se. Och då fick den kameran jag hade i fickan duga.

Ja, hela den mörka högen till höger består av vad du tror.Foto: Jan Ainali. Licens: CC-BY-SA-3.0.